President Trump’s new budget proposal calls for cutting the main source of federal funds for state and local libraries.
The president’s budget outline, released earlier this month, would eliminate a little-known federal agency called the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
The proposed cuts weren’t exactly a surprise.
Executive Order 14238, signed by the president on March 14, already put IMLS on the chopping block, but the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island has temporarily blocked its implementation.
Now the White House is hoping Congress will agree to eliminate the agency altogether, thereby saving the taxpayers about $294 million a year. Rhode Island’s share of that total is about $1.4 million, supporting staff development programs, interlibrary loans, e-books, and audiobooks.
“Our state library will lose about 45% of their budget,” said Sen. Jack Reed.
At an event Thursday at the Cranston Public Library, the state’s top federal lawmakers argued that libraries are essential services, and that the money potentially saved would come at too great a cost.
“Let’s be very, very clear,” said Rep. Gabe Amo. “An attack on libraries is an attack on knowledge and it’s attack on opportunity.”
Rep. Seth Magaziner sees the proposed library cuts to be part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to try and police people’s thoughts.
Earlier this year, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. military academies such as West Point and Annapolis to purge their curricula of ideas the president deems to be “un-American,” including works by celebrated Black authors Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Te-Nehisi Coates.
“They have decided that they trust young people in the service academies to fly $40 million aircraft but not to read Toni Morrison,” said Magaziner. “It’s insane.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse noted the attacks have even extended to the Library of Congress, which (at least as its name would suggest) is rightly part of the legislative, not the executive branch.
Nonetheless, the president recently fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, for pursuing what the White House describes as a “DEI agenda” and for supposedly permitting books that the administration deemed inappropriate for children. The White House also fired Shira Perlmutter, the registrar of copyrights, whose office falls under the Library of Congress’s purview.
Perlmutter filed suit, claiming the White House had no authority to fire her. But, earlier this week, a federal judge declined to reinstate her pending the outcome of her lawsuit.
Whitehouse accused the administration of having ulterior motives in going after the copyright chief.
“It’s the creepy tech bros who want their AI businesses to be immune from copyright,” he said.
Rhode Island’s four Democratic members of Congress admitted that successfully pushing back on the president’s agenda will require some Republican members of Congress to break ranks with the White House.
But they said Republicans will eventually need Democratic votes to pass a budget, and Rhode Island’s lawmakers vowed to make libraries a priority in the eventual horse-trading.
